Alternate Sights

Artist

Curator

Exhibition Dates

Apr 5 – Apr 29, 2018

Opening Reception

Thu April 12, 20186:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Gallery Hours

Tu–Sa: 1 pm–5 pm; Su&M: closed

Perception and its resulting affect greatly inform the basis of human experience and our conception of the world. Through works by Vancouver-based artist Scott Massey and Montreal-based artist Léna Mill-Reuillard, Alternate Sights draws connections between immersive media installations, Vancouver’s history in photoconceptual art, Canadian experimental cinema, and the changing ecology of working spaces toward an understanding of expanded photography and its corporeal experience.

Mill-Reuillard’s and Massey’s works peel apart our expectations of what we think we will see: navigating a fine line between images, spaces, and temporality and drawing attention to psychological tricks to the mind. The artists’ bodies take a central role in disrupting scenes ranging from the bucolic pastoral to the studio, where shifting states of perceptibility undo the fixity of meaning. In Mill-Reuillard’s Machinari, a series of long shots are deployed as structural and transitory snares. Her uncanny use of the recursive loop challenges the veracity of the frame, offering alternatives to fixed perceptive spaces. Stepping in and out of actual or fictitious scenes, her hands are key in revealing each trompe l’oeil. In Light Adjustments, Massey manipulates various apparatus to exploit light entering the camera and expand what is visible. Present or implied, his hands intervene in each scene in subtle acts: in turn obfuscating or mediating a chosen location heavy with connotations. The layering on of phenomenon reveals parallel visual worlds below the surface of the image, through both the ontology of the technical and the resulting spectrum of experience.

Expanded photography through performative media installation underlines the desire to understand how we come to know what we know. In proposing the photographic frame as the model of the disembodied eye, photography and media are apt mediums to critique knowledge systems regarding vision, perception, and the body.